The nation's detention system for illegal immigrants will be overhauled in an effort to improve medical care, increase accountability and reduce costs, federal officials announced Thursday.

The current system, a patchwork of about 350 privately run detention centers and county jails that lease space to the government, has come under fire from groups such as Amnesty International USA. The groups say the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency violates due-process rights and provides poor medical care that has sometimes resulted in inmate deaths.

The overhaul will address most of those criticisms and make the system less reliant on jails, said John Morton, assistant secretary of ICE. He did not give specifics but said illegal immigrants who don't have criminal records could be in a less restrictive setting.

"This isn't about whether or not we're going to continue to detain people. We are," he said. "This is about how we're going to detain people."

There has been significant growth in detention of illegal immigrants. In 2004, the system housed up to 19,444 people at any one time, compared with up to 33,400 now.

Changes announced Thursday include creation of an Office of Detention Policy and Planning to spearhead the overhaul and measures to enhance supervision of the facilities. The changes will take up to five years, Morton said.

ICE will no longer house families in the T. Don Hutto facility in Texas. It has been the target of lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union and others who alleged, among other things, that children were being detained illegally, had to wear prison uniforms and got only one hour of education a day.

Families would go to a facility in Pennsylvania or be put into alternative detention programs, he said.

"I'm elated that there won't be families at Hutto," said Vanita Gupta, an ACLU attorney. "No child should have ever been there." A legal settlement in 2007 improved conditions, but "Hutto is still a prison," she said.

Gupta complained that the plan does not include legally binding standards to hold ICE accountable.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates less immigration and more enforcement, said the move shows ICE is not serious about deporting illegals.

"This is one in a continuous stream of announcements from the administration that appears to potentially redirect resources away from what Americans want most, which is an increase in interior apprehensions, enforcement and removal," he said.

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